Maurice and Rachel Campbell stand outside the new Yellow Deli, which opened this summer in Island Pond. Photos by Paul Lefebvre
ISLAND POND — Late in July a storefront here that once served as Bartlett’s Five and Dime and featured a barbershop below sidewalk level opened as a café with a new but familiar name.
Actually not one, but two familiar names from the recent past: The Common Sense or The Yellow Deli. When last seen, The Common Sense-Yellow Deli was going up in flames from a fire that threatened to take the downtown section of Cross Street along with it.
Among those fighting the fire that January morning in 1991 were men who caught the eye of a reporter.
“Bearded church members helped move the goods and furniture out of their neighbors’ apartment, and some of them fought with hoses in frigid puddles in the middle of Cross Street, under the guidance of firemen,” said a story that appeared next day in the Chronicle.
Back in the day, The Yellow Deli may have been the only restaurant in the Northeast Kingdom that was open 24 hours a day, except Saturdays. It was certainly the only restaurant in town run by a group of evangelical newcomers whose members appeared to have stepped right out of the pages of the Old Testament. The men were bearded and wore their hair in ponytails; the women wore long skirts and covered their heads, a practice that earned them, and even the group as a whole, the derisive name “hanky-heads” among some of the rednecks and rowdies.
Whatever the religion, the taunts came easy as the entire country was on edge. The group arrived in town the same year as the Jonestown massacre occurred, in which hundreds of people following a charismatic leader with godlike aspirations died in far-away Guyana from drinking Kool-Aid laced with cyanide. The generation gap that had arisen over the Vietnam War now appeared to be flaring up again over those joining radical religious groups like Scientology or the Hari Krishna movement, or becoming followers of the Reverend Sun Myung Moon’s Unification Church, whose followers — like members of the Island Pond community — were mockingly called Moonies on the street. Cults were becoming the latest flashpoint in the American psyche.
Against the checkered background of a charismatic movement that was sweeping the country, the Northeast Kingdom Community Church, as the group was named, came into town. It came at a time of uncertainty in the national mood, and at a time when Island Pond was searching for a new identity. Like many townspeople, members of the church also appeared to be looking for an identity. The one they adopted was hardly reassuring to people who had lived in Island Pond nearly all their lives. The group home-schooled their children, lived collectively in houses close to one another, set up their own medical clinic, and refused to register births or deaths with the town clerk. The only thing the townspeople and members of the group appeared to have in common was that they lived under the same sky, breathed the same air, and each mistrusted the other.
Finally on June 22, 1984, the hostility and mistrust came to a head in what has since been called the Island Pond Raid. Armed State Police officers raided the ten or 11 houses the group owned, seized their children and took them away in buses. The raid came in response to widespread allegations of child abuse. Members were accused of disciplining their kids by spanking them with wooden dowels of the size that is often associated with balloon sticks. The raid ended the same day it began as a District Court judge ruled the police action unconstitutional. All the kids were released back to their parents, and an uneasy truce was struck between those outside and inside the church.
In the 25 years since the raid, both the church and the town have seen their numbers dwindle. No longer a railroad town, Island Pond is slowly making itself over as a destination town for people looking for a wilderness or outdoor vacation experience. The church, now known as The Twelve Tribes, has started other communities throughout the country and in places as far away as France and Brazil. Yet, as one of the members pointed out recently, Island Pond remains the hub; the place where the group started a community in 1978.
The French are known to say that the more things change, the more they remain the same. But if the story of the Northeast Kingdom Community Church, or The Twelve Tribes, over the last two decades is not a story about change, then it is arguably a story about adaptability. Early in the group’s history, members hand-painted signs welcoming visitors driving into Island Pond. They were repeatedly vandalized to the point that every now and then they would have to be replaced.
Sometime this spring, the sign greeting motorists coming from the west and south on Vermont Route 105 and 114 turned up missing. Karen, a woman who helps manages the community’s shoe store on Main Street, recalls a phone call from Island Pond’s town manager reporting the missing sign. She shrugs her shoulder while telling the story, saying that before it turned up missing, someone had put a bullet hole or two through it. To this day she doesn’t know whether it was the painter or not who took the sign down for repairs. But neither does she regard the bullet holes as any different than those that show up on Vermont highway signs. The shots fired into the Island Pond sign, she says, probably came from those “who like to do that sort of thing.”
In the interviews that follow, four members of the community who were in Island Pond the day of the raid, discuss what they believe has changed and what has remained over the last 25 years.
Blake Janney
In the days immediately following the 1984 raid, Blake — a member who came with the group to Island Pond from Tennessee — said he began to see people from outside the church come into The Yellow Deli and offer their support. Not surprisingly, people with equally long hair who had come to Vermont to live on the land “were among the first who started to show support for the community.”
On the day of the raid, Blake was working the graveyard shift at The Yellow Deli. He recalls police coming into the restaurant, asking questions, and looking around. At some point in their investigation, they learned about the presence of a safe in the restaurant and ordered another member to open it. Blake says the fellow was someone who liked to ham it up, and with visible trepidations he opened the safe and brought out a fresh loaf of bread.
When asked what a loaf of bread was doing in a safe, he replied he had baked it for a friend and didn’t want anyone else to eat it.
Prior to coming to Vermont, the Tennessee people tried to merge their beliefs with a more established church. “They kind of accepted us in hopes that Jesus would clean us up,” says Blake. Once in Island Pond, though, the group began to adopt a culture of its own. Instead of Christian rock, he says, they began to listen to folk music, like the kind heard in Eastern Europe and Israel. The lifestyle in Island Pond was also basic and meager, a change reflected in the way members of the group dressed.
“It was like a separate culture was starting to emerge, and we were poorer. I wasn’t used to living poor,” says Blake, who passed up a chance to take over a family business in Tennessee. “Took a little getting used to.”
Blake came to Island Pond at about the time he characterizes as “the end of Jesus movement.” He also came at a time when the town was reeling from the diminished presence of the railroad, an industry that for 100 years or so had given the town its identity. It was an atmosphere that viewed change with suspicion, especially one that came in the form of a large group of outsiders who looked a lot like the hippies in the commune Earth People’s Park, 17 miles up the road in Norton. Only this group came with a set of religious beliefs that suggested Armageddon might be right around the corner.
Poverty was not the only experience that confronted the newcomers. First came snowballs and stones, and then one night when Blake was working, gunfire swept The Yellow Deli.
“I thought it was firecrackers, and then I was hit,” he says, recalling being struck by a ricocheting piece of lead that left a red mark.
Yet, despite the random acts of violence, the relationship between the town and the church was neither all one thing nor the other. Blake recalls one night when a group of revelers from the Osborne Hotel next door came into the deli for a late night snack and got into a fracas. One of them pulled a knife, but before he could hurt anyone, a member of his group punched him out. Afterward, he turned and offered an apology tinged with respect.
“You people never fight back,” he told Blake. “You take us outside, but you never fight us.”
The raid may have been the single most contributing factor in prompting a change in the relationship between the town and the church. It also may have uncovered differences among those in the community. Among townspeople, some hearts and heads were turned when several members of the church joined the fire department as volunteers and became members of the ambulance squad.
Blake believes that the decision to become more active in town affairs was more an individual than a group decision. Still there was a growing sense that there were areas where the town and church had common cause.
“After all,” he says, “we had ten or eleven houses in town.”
Over time the group may have evolved more as a community than as a church, although Blake is quick to add that his beliefs are rooted in fundamental Christianity. To live in community, he says, is to “move back to the garden. I believe at one time that’s the way it was. I believe in the fall. It’s not just a fairy tale.”
If the group has changed any since coming to Island Pond, Blake suggests it has become more flexible or less autocratic. People in the community who wanted more rules and regulations didn’t last.
“They’re not here now,” he says.
As for his experience in Island Pond, Blake says he “grew to love logging.” Because he worked in the woods, he says, a friend decided he should be called Judah, after a Biblical figure who lived outdoors. Blake, who is in his early fifties, appears to be at home with either name, expressing no preference when asked what he likes to be called. He derives some satisfaction, though, from the day in the woods when he was driving skidder for a logging contractor who, as a boy, had tormented people in the community and had thrown stones through the windows of The Yellow Deli. Blake did his job, and eventually the boss approached him with an apology, saying he “really felt bad” for how he had acted years earlier.
Blake spent some time in the group’s Lancaster, New Hampshire, community, but came back to Island Pond. At some point there were rumors circulating that the group was going to pull up stakes and leave Island Pond. The rumors proved to be unfounded, but they revealed a reservoir of support among some of the townspeople. Blake recalls people coming into the store and telling him:
“You can’t go. You’ve done so much for this community.”
Today as one of the managers of the group’s shoe store, Simon the Tanner, Blake reminisces about the old days when the Osborne Hotel was being described as the “wildest quarter acre” in the state. He says he’s kind of sad to see Island Pond become so tame.
Lloyd Forkey
Lloyd Forkey came from upstate New York to join the community in 1982 after it had set up its base in Island Pond. He and Blake are the two men
Blake Janney and Lloyd Forkey in the community’s shoe store where each works and serves customers.
shoppers usually encounter when they go to the back of the shoe store to check out boots and outdoor gear. At the time of the raid, he says, the community was much tighter than it is today. But he suggests the way the community raises its children has changed.
“We’ve learned that our children have needs, and if we don’t meet those needs, they are going to live somewhere else,” he says.
He believes membership in the group began falling off because the adults were too busy “to identify with our children.” Some left, some stayed, and some left and came back. Today, he says, the children of the raid who have grown up and remained in the community serve as the group’s role model families.
The raid, he says, had “a wonderful, humbling effect for all sides, ourselves included. It made us want people to see our hearts.”
But that may have been easier said than done. The group, Lloyd says, remained apart and separate from the town. “We were a culture living within a culture.” It made it difficult for outsiders to get to know them, and caused what he calls “a clash within ourselves.” A clash, he added, from which they emerged more comfortable with one another.
Spanking children, he says, only works when it is practiced as a first response and not as a last resort or a product of frustration. He estimates of the children living in the community during the time of the raid, that roughly 80 percent have remained with the group. Not all have remained in Island Pond. “We fill four houses now, including the Maples,” he says, speaking of the house that those outside as well as inside the group recognize as the community’s main dwelling.
Lloyd and his wife, Karen, joined the town’s ambulance squad and became certified emergency medical technicians. A man who once refused help from the group when he became stuck in a snowbank now tells Lloyd and Karen, if anything unexpectedly should happen to him, he wants them at his side in the ambulance.
“Do everything you can to be at peace with your fellow man,” says Lloyd, quoting scripture.
Outwardly, the community has become part of Island Pond’s downtown district; its shoe store draws people from surrounding towns as well as tourists who come for the summer or are avid snowmobilers. And expectations are high for the new café, the new Yellow Deli.
“The only thing that surprises me is how long it has taken,” says Lloyd.
Maurice and Rachel Campbell
Painted by a member of the community, this sign on the eastern outskirts of town is one of three hand-painted signs that welcome motorists to Island Pond. It recently was peppered by shotgun pellets.
When the old Yellow Deli burned down in 1991, a member of the community, who was standing across the street watching the fire, told a reporter: “It’s like watching an old friend go.”
The Yellow Deli was housed in the building known locally as the Doyon Block. It was one of the town’s oldest buildings, and standing three stories high, its size alone commanded a dominant presence downtown. When it burned, anyone familiar with the town’s layout felt its absence. If the community has achieved only a modicum of acceptance in Island Pond, it may have done so by occupying and restoring some of the oldest wooden buildings in town. While living in but apart from the town, it has helped preserve its nineteenth-century appearance, right down to the welcome signs that one of its members has painted to inform people they are entering Island Pond.
Today, the community owns houses in town, occupying four, using another for educational purposes, while two are vacant and showing their age. It’s a sight that makes Maurice sigh and shake his head. A carpenter who grew up in Barton, he appreciates a well-maintained house. But the numbers weren’t there.
“We were down 25 to 20 people,” he says, speaking of the number of members living in the Island Pond community a couple years ago. For reasons that might be partly sentimental, though, the community appears to be rebounding — up to as many as 55. Its resurgence comes as no surprise to Maurice.
“Island Pond has been known as where it all started,” he says, speaking of the group’s origin. “There are a lot of people who have a lot of memories about Island Pond.
Rachel, who was grew up in Derby, recalls going through Island Pond as a young woman and thinking she was glad she lived elsewhere. When she and Maurice moved into town as part of the community, what she saw did little to change her mind.
“It was like the Wild West,” she says, recalling the stone thrown and the shots taken at the community’s houses.
Among the children who were swooped up in the Island Pond Raid, their daughter, 17, was the oldest.
Sociologists say that whenever a group is threatened or attacked by outsiders, it becomes stronger. Whether that happened or not to the Island Pond community is difficult to say. What did happen, though, says Rachel, is that many townspeople were shocked to see police forcefully remove the children from their homes and take them away in buses.
During the 25 years since the raid, Maurice and Rachel have spent time in California, Missouri, and Bellows Falls, living in sister communities to the one in Island Pond. The couple moved back to the Island Pond community sometime around 2002 or 2003.
A few weeks ago, as they sat in the café with their grandchildren, waiting for their son who lives in a community in New York, they spoke excitedly about the return of The Yellow Deli, and once again having a place where they can interact with the public.
During the years after the 1991 fire, Maurice recalls people coming into the shoe store and asking if the community was going have another Yellow Deli. “We were pretty small then,” he says. “We didn’t have the faith to do it.”
He says news of the raid went all the way out to California and came back again. Rachel says the experience made it clear to her that “if you follow the Son of God, you will be prosecuted.”
In its infancy, she concedes that the group may have zealously pushed its views. Admittedly, the very size of the group, about 100 strong, caused fear among some natives they were going to take over the town. But living in Island Pond has neither caused her to change her beliefs nor left her wishing she lived elsewhere.
“I can look anyone in the eye in this town and talk to them about what I believe,” she says. “I have no regrets, no regrets. It was a hard beginning, but I’m thankful for it.”
The return of The Yellow Deli is like a second wind, says Maurice. It will once again give the group an opportunity to serve and meet people. But maybe, it is also like a second chance. “I feel we have more confidence to meet people where they’re at,” he says.
When the couple returned to Island Pond, Rachel says she noticed a difference. “It wasn’t the Wild West anymore.”
If the community continues to grow by attracting old and new members, Maurice may get his wish to restore one of their old wooden houses, the Arbor House. So, he says, “It won’t be a reproach.”
Editor’s note: Island Pond is Paul Lefebvre’s hometown.
